It has become a well-established principle that an essential key to success is the ability to focus and persist through unpleasant or unexciting tasks for the sake of a future reward. The ability to sustain attention for prolonged periods of time is essential to not only school work, but also productivity in the workplace, health and fitness, and even success in relationships.
Much of our understanding of the importance of delayed gratification stems from the now famous Stanford University “marshmallow study” that was initially conducted in the 1960s, and has been repeated numerous times since. The study and subsequent studies tested the relationships between the children's ability to delay gratification with their future success—in scholastic, work, and personal arenas. In the experiment, children were offered a treat that they could receive immediately, but told that they would receive an additional treat if they could wait. After being left alone for a period of time with their treat, they would be rewarded an additional treat if they could withstand the temptation to eat the initial treat immediately. Tracking these children over time and evaluating various parameters of life success, it was found that the longer children were able to delay gratification during the study, the greater tendency for them to excel in the measured parameters of life success.
In view of the marshmallow test and both studies and anecdotal evidence and observations that corroborate the results, psychologists, behavioral scientists, and even performance specialists agree that the principle of “delayed gratification” may be among one of the most important skills or habits for achieving personal goals of any kind.
Training a person to delay gratification requires overcoming or repressing a natural impulse in the frontal cortex to respond to an immediately available reward in favor of a better future outcome. Like any other impulse, the tendency to go for the here and now would naturally dominate, in the absence of intervention. Just like other impulses, however, with intervention and training it is very possible to overcome this tendency. Successfully overcoming this impulse and reinforcing the accomplishment of delaying gratification can form a new habit that will then dominate, and lead to good results throughout life. Habits such as doing homework before going out to play will seem natural and desirable. Eating well and exercise for the sake of intangible future goals like fitness and health will be the norm. Later it may translate into a strong willingness to pay career dues or go through extensive professional training, for the sake of success. In everyday life, it may translate into a consistent ability to focus attention on work productivity whenever needed.
Just as the initial marshmallow experiment was conducted among four to six year old children, it is clear that these habits form early. Clearly then, the time to intervene and retrain impulses and create positive habits, is at a young age. Since young children do a great deal of their learning using toys, using a toy to train behavior modification is an appropriate way to generate new positive habits and skills. Various toys and systems have been proposed by others that seek to strengthen the work/reward or behavior/reward connections, but do not reinforce the value of and habits of delayed gratification. While these units may be suitable for the particular purpose employed, or for general use, they would not be as suitable for the purposes of the present disclosure as disclosed hereafter.
In the present disclosure, where a document, act or item of knowledge is referred to or discussed, this reference or discussion is not an admission that the document, act or item of knowledge or any combination thereof was at the priority date, publicly available, known to the public, part of common general knowledge or otherwise constitutes prior art under the applicable statutory provisions; or is known to be relevant to an attempt to solve any problem with which the present disclosure is concerned.
While certain aspects of conventional technologies have been discussed to facilitate the present disclosure, no technical aspects are disclaimed and it is contemplated that the claims may encompass one or more of the conventional technical aspects discussed herein.